What does it all mean? It made her wonder. And she sat down with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of water.
Not whiskey anymore.
The thoughts she pondered while she was awake were the same thoughts that haunted her while she slept. Lucid nightmares crafted to look nothing like the things they might represent.
Interpretations.
She paused to light another cigarette and stared at the empty world below her. The vacuous space she'd so easily filled with late night trips to lala land. A place she wouldn't describe now, even to her deepest fears.
Where had she been all those years? Between the days sat reading in a dimly lit hallway while twelve year old toes two-stepped their way around her cocoon, and the nights she'd spent howling at the moon. Caught in a world that meant nothing to her and the people she'd surrounded herself with--until now.
Where was she now? Suspended in a limbo, between a place that had seemed so full while she was filling it yet so empty in retrospect, and a place that held all the possibilities in the world. Literally. If she know what they all were.
Which direction could this world take her if only she would let it?
Ash fell from the cigarette she'd hardly smoked. It burned a hole in the corner of her notebook. 200 pages, half of them written on, but how many held real meaning?
Answers. The solution to every problem, to every inkling of a question is an answer. Or is it?
Is an answer all we really need, she wondered, to be satisfied? Does an answer quell our drive, our thirst for the recognition of a problem? Or is an answer empty as well? Because with every answer comes an end. If answers to everything came about, then wouldn't we--everything--be at an end?
The existentialist tripper, they called her, when she wasn't fighting for air. In the days she let herself drift, covering landscapes in a footprint and welding the trees to let herself pass. The earth was her canvas but she didn't paint pretty pictures. She stamped seals on lakes and turned mountains upside down. Somebody else had made this, she didn't need to do that now.
The places her dreams could take her...she often wondered if they were real.
How powerful is the mind, she needed to know, does it make or is it sown?
The cigarette went out as it burnt her fingertips. The last light of day turned to ash. The night could take over, leave day for the memory like so many other things that have come to pass. A distant taste of a breeze that brought life and vitality to the things that it nourished, and yet was so overlooked that until it disappeared nobody knew it was there.
She wasn't any closer. Hours stretched before her like waterless weeks on the Saharan plateau. No clues crept toward her, nothing yelled out its aid. She was truly alone in a world that held no mercy.
Not even for the dead.
And yet she kept searching, digging, delving for clues to the age old question that had plagued so many before. She didn't think to ask why none of them had ever figured it out. This was her battle. The journey she'd been given.
All those nights suspended between delirium and poetry, aided by whiskey and cocaine in a vile. Sometimes she'd thought she'd found the answer four days into an existentialist's nightmare. Only to wake up and see daylight, hear birds chirping, saluting a new day; only to wonder anew--
What does it all mean?

This twist of your mind leaves me.. far behind beneath the... light of some day that isn't to-day, or even yester-day, but some time long gone by when we had. Peace of mind.

Peace of mind.

That feeling behind your eyes that sits with-out compromise. And waits. For you to decide the rest, of your lives... without a sigh or a trace of goodbye. You stand and say your lines and leave the rest of us..
Behind.

Leave the, rest of us. Behind.

Now go do something productive. X.